Pod Insights Park Predators The Pair About this episode When two children’s skeletons are discovered in one of Vancouver’s premier urban parks in 1953, the mystery of who they were and how they were killed haunts residents. Decades later, curiosity and cutting-edge science solve the enduring question: Who were the Babes in the Woods?
Transcript 0:00 Speaker 00 Hi, park enthusiasts. It's Delia. If you listen to Park Predators, you already know that sometimes the most beautiful places can hide the darkest secrets. But what happens when the danger isn't miles from civilization? It's in your community, and sometimes even in your own backyard. On Crime Junkie, hosts Ashley and Britt dive into real cases every week, from missing persons to unsolved murders, breaking down what we know, what we don't, and the details that still don't sit right. If you care about the stories behind the headlines and the victims at the center of them, you'll want to check out Crime Junkie. Listen now, wherever you get your podcasts.
0:40 Speaker 00 Hi, park enthusiasts. I'm your host, Delia D'Ambra. And the case I'm going to tell you about today has been unsolved for more than 70 years. It's one of British Columbia's most notorious cold cases, with events and updates stretching between 1953 and 2022. For decades, the press referred to this crime as "The Babes in the Woods" case, a nickname that cast a sort of haunting, folkloric shadow over the incident. But by the time the investigation entered the 21st century, police were more determined than ever to get to the bottom of what for so long, so many people had considered, for lack of a better expression, ancient history. The story takes place in Stanley Park, British Columbia, Vancouver's first and largest urban
1:25 Speaker 00 park. According to the city of Vancouver's website, the park holds nearly 1,000 acres of coastal temperate rainforest, almost 17 miles of trails, and mountain-to-sea views that are spectacular. The park is surrounded by water and shares a peninsula with downtown Vancouver. Looking at the area from above, there's a stark contrast between Stanley Park's deep green forest and the city skyline. The park is filled with over half a million trees, including centuries-old western red cedars, big-leaf maples, and Douglas firs, which have stood as tall as 164 feet. Woods is the dominant terrain throughout the park, with fewer open green spaces than what you'd see in, say, New York's Central Park, for example.
2:08 Speaker 00 Some of the best viewpoints to take insights at the park can be found north of an area known as Beaver Lake. And it was in this area that the discovery of two children's remains became one of the most notorious crimes in British Columbia that still needs closure.
2:24 Speaker 00 This is Park Predators.
3:08 Speaker 00 On Tuesday morning, January 13, 1953, a park worker named Albert Tong was clearing brush to plant trees north of Beaver Lake in Stanley Park when he heard something crack beneath his foot. When he lifted his shoe, he noticed he'd stepped onto a pile of leaves that were somewhat deep. It seems that because of the way the pile crunched when he stepped on it, Albert suspected that something might be buried beneath it, and he even turned to his coworkers and told them that. But then, for some reason, he just went back to work and put it out of his mind. Two days later, though, he found himself thinking about it again and couldn't shake a nagging suspicion that something was hidden beneath the surface of the area he'd been working in. So, in the morning on Thursday, the 15th, he went back.
3:53 Speaker 00 And for reference, the location where he'd been working wasn't very far off the beaten path. Only about 50 yards south of a trail in the park known as Reservoir Trail, which is about 150 yards from a road called Stanley Park Drive. When Albert arrived, he raked at the leaves and quickly unearthed a dark fur coat that had badly deteriorated. I mean, this thing was in such bad shape that it had actually worn down to the lining. Beneath it were skeletal remains of two small bodies.
4:23 Speaker 00 According to coverage by the province, the two sets of remains were lying side by side and positioned in opposite directions. Meaning, the feet for one set was near the head of the other, and vice versa. Upon first glance, Albert noted that one of the skeletons was a bit larger and longer than the other. And the head and shoulders of that larger skeleton were draped over the feet of the smaller one, which was lying face down. The skulls for each body had holes in them, and it was clear that one of them had been broken by Albert's foot the first time he'd been there. Which makes sense why he heard that cracking sound. As Albert looked around and studied the remains closer, I imagine he got a pit in his stomach. Because, still sitting on the smaller of the two skulls was what appeared to be a child's leather aviator helmet.
5:08 Speaker 00 And just a stone's throw away, near the right hand of the larger set of remains, was another leather helmet that had goggles attached to it. The skeletons also had matching Oxford shoes in two different sizes, as well as identical leather belts. Reporting by Jim Smith for the Vancouver News Herald stated that both of them had on either a zipper jacket or sweater, and the larger skeleton donned an overcoat-style jacket. Among all those items was a woman's pennylofer, size 5.5, or some sources say 7.5. And that was lodged under the shoulder of the larger skeleton. After discovering the remains, Albert relayed what he'd found, and Vancouver police officers quickly made their way out to the park to process the scene and collect the skeletons.
5:52 Speaker 00 To authorities, it looked like the bones and clothing had been there for at least a few years. That estimation seemed to be based on the fact that they were skeletonized. The fact that the bones had settled into the earth enough for small tree roots to grow through them, and that there were distinct layers of leaves on top of the bodies. That detail about the leaves suggested that several seasons had passed since the bodies were first deposited there. Near the remains, investigators also found a blue lunchbox with white trim, and a small, rusty lathing hatchet that had a broken handle. Full disclosure, I had no idea what a lathing hatchet was, so I had to Google it. The results I found explain that these kinds of hatchets are tools that are used for trimming
6:33 Speaker 00 and nailing thin strips of wood, known as laves, to a building's framework, as a foundation for things like plaster or tiles. One side is a hammer, the other side is a thin, sharp blade. Around noon on the 15th, police removed the items of evidence they'd found in the woods and transported the skeletons to the city's morgue, where a coroner pathologist was scheduled to examine them and conduct tests. Within days of the discovery becoming public knowledge, the press dubbed the pair of skeletons "The Babes in the Woods Case." The phrase was in reference to a traditional English fairy tale that tells of two orphaned children who become lost and die in the woods. In the story, a robin scatters leaves over their bodies.
7:15 Speaker 00 News reporting about the actual ages and sexes of the deceased pair was all over the place. For example, the province initially described the skeletons as those of a boy and a girl, ages 10 and 12. But the Vancouver Sun described the bodies with no specific ages, but stated that they were either two children or potentially a woman and a child. There was yet another article by the Vancouver News-Herald which stated that the children were a boy and a girl, ages 10 and 7, respectively. Later, a reporting by A&E's Cold Case Files stated the victims were a boy and girl ages 6 to 10 years old. So yeah, like I said, all over the map. Thankfully, though, by January 19th, four days after the bodies were found,
7:58 Speaker 00 the coroner pathologist put an end to the speculation.
8:03 Speaker 00 He concluded that one set of skeletal remains belonged to a boy, who was around the age of 6 or 7, and the other belonged to a girl, who was either 8 or 9 years old when she died. He said that the girl had light brown hair and a slender build, while the boy had dark hair. The pathologist also described the boy as "on the sturdy side." The doctor estimated that the children had been murdered in either 1948 or 1949, so about 5 or 6 years before they were discovered. Now that investigators had some basic identifiers for the two children, they began combing through missing persons records for any boys or girls who'd gone missing who were around the ages of the pair that had been found. Vancouver detective Don McKay led the investigation,
8:48 Speaker 00 and one missing persons case in particular caught his team's attention within the first week or so of working the case. In 1950, a woman with two children who'd rented a small boat at Kitsellano Beach, just west of downtown Vancouver, had disappeared. Her body was later found in a nearby inlet, but the boat and the children were never recovered. So it made sense for Don and his team to at least consider if the two Stanley Park skeletons could be connected to that case. However, just as quickly as that seemed like it could be a good lead, Don and his colleagues couldn't find anything that connected the missing children from the boat incident to the Stanley Park remains. After that, the case languished. In the first three months, detectives reviewed 41 pairs of children
9:33 Speaker 00 who were unaccounted for that they thought could maybe be the two kids, but nothing panned out. That effort wasn't a total loss, though, in the grand scheme of things, because in the process of combing through those cases and tracking down leads, investigators ended up locating more than half of the children on that list. Some were as far away from Canada as Scotland and South America, and at least 26 of them were minors whose whereabouts just hadn't made it back to their family members who were looking for them. Anyway, by the end of April, Vancouver investigators had worked through dozens of tips and put a lot of time and resources into the case, but they still weren't any closer to identifying who the two kids were who'd been left in the park. To shake things up, Detective McKay and his team
10:16 Speaker 00 worked directly with news outlets like The Vancouver Sun, in what I imagine a lot of people might have viewed as an unprecedented public-private partnership between the police and the media. Detective McKay laid out in detail his official theory about the case. He explained that he was convinced the children were victims of a double homicide that had taken place either sometime in the winter of 1947 to 1948, or 1948 to 1949. He told the publication that he believed the children's mother or a female guardian had led them through the park and into the woods, then used the lathing hatchet to kill them, striking them both in the head. McKay stated that the boy had two clefs in his skull that fit the proportions of the hatchet's blade,
11:01 Speaker 00 and the girl had one clef that also fit the blade. Later, coverage by the province and producers of Killer Crime reported that the damage inflicted to one or both of the skulls included fracture wounds as well, which were suspected as having come from the hammer end of the hatchet.
11:20 Speaker 00 In his remarks to the Vancouver Sun, Detective McKay described the wounds the victims had suffered as "light blows to the head", which he surmised would have been made by a woman, not a man. Per the police's theory, after killing the children, the woman then laid her fur coat over their bodies, in either an act of compassion, concealment, or in my opinion, possibly even both. And because the fur coat was a women's size that was rather small, authorities suspected that she was probably around 5'3" tall and weighed between 125 and 135 pounds. Investigators also theorized that at some point while laying one of the bodies down, the woman had gotten her shoe stuck beneath one of the children, and that's why a woman's pennylofer was found alongside the bodies.
12:06 Speaker 00 As far as where the perpetrator went after that, well, McKay had his own theory about that too. He told the newspaper in part, "I think she then carried on down to the inlet and jumped in." End quote. Now, when I first read that quote, I was like, "Wait, what inlet?" Well, according to the source material, about 200 yards away from the wooded area where the bones were found is a body of water known as Burrard Inlet. It surrounds the peninsula Stanley Park is located on. So that's where McKay got that detail in his theory. But what's odd to me is that up until this point, investigators hadn't pointed to any specific physical evidence that proved their female perpetrator theory. For example, there had been no reports of a woman's body being found in Burrard Inlet
12:51 Speaker 00 in the timeframe McKay and his team believed the crime had occurred. The only situation like that which happened was the case from 1950 that I mentioned earlier, where the woman who went boating with her two kids was found at Kitsellano Beach. However, that had happened further south of Stanley Park, and it almost seemed like McKay's theory was inspired by that case, but he and his team had already investigated that incident and seemingly ruled it out. In the Vancouver Sun's piece about police's theory, they ran images that were aimed at reconstructing the outfit the boy victim had been wearing on the day he was killed. The pictures showed reproductions of the coat, pants, shoes, and aviator helmet he'd been donning. Authorities also shared reproduction photos of what the fur coat, the abandoned pennylofer,
13:36 Speaker 00 the hatchet, and the lunchbox might have looked like before they were exposed to the elements. Now, try not to get too mad about this next part, but according to the Vancouver Sun, because the actual clothing evidence was so badly deteriorated when it was found, police decided to wash some of the items so that they could get a better idea of what color they were. I know, just hearing the words "police washed the clothing evidence" dares to send me into a full rage, but to be fair, this was 1953 we're talking about. Anyway, the end result of washing some of the clothing was that investigators were able to determine that the boy's zipper jacket was red from a Canadian manufacturer and had a Fraser Tardan pattern on it.
14:20 Speaker 00 His pants were described to be either cream or fawn colored. In July, nearly six months into the investigation, the police hired an Austrian anthropologist and sculptor to create lifelike recreations of the victim's facial features based on their skulls. Obviously, some tweaking had to be done in order for the sculptor to do her thing. So as part of the process, she cast plaster models and filled the missing areas with material in order to build layers of skin and muscle that could be shaped into the facial features of the kids based on their bone structures and so forth. By December of 1953, the reconstructive work appeared to have paid off, because it was then that authorities received what probably felt like their strongest lead yet.
15:08 Speaker 00 One day last year, detectives knocked on the door of a multimillion-dollar mansion in Los Angeles County. Inside, they found a strange scene. A dining area converted into classrooms with children and toddlers seated at rows of desks. The couple that lived there had 21 kids.
15:29 Speaker 01 It's a house that looks like a castle, but it's under investigation for being a possible factory, a baby factory.
15:36 Speaker 00 Where had these children come from? Almost all of them were born through surrogates. But those surrogates had been deceived.
15:44 Speaker 02 Me and my coworker, we named her the surrogate pimp.
15:46 Speaker 03 That's the one time that we called the cops because she was screaming. And then he pulled out a gun.
15:51 Speaker 04 I started crying. I was like, what the heck did I just get myself into?
15:57 Speaker 00 I'm Ava Kaufman. The Journey is a new series from In the Dark and The New Yorker. Find it now in the In the Dark feed, wherever you get your podcasts. According to coverage by the Vancouver News-Herald and Vancouver Sun, a local woman had read about the remains police were trying to identify and decided that she needed to meet with Detective McKay to tell him about an unusual sight she'd witnessed while in Stanley Park on October 5, 1947, nearly six years before the bones were found. This witness claimed that while she'd been walking in the park with a guy at around 2:30
16:38 Speaker 00 PM, she'd seen a woman wearing a fur coat enter the woods with a boy and a girl and overheard the woman refer to the boy as either Ronnie or Rodney. The witness said that at the time, the woman had been carrying a small hatchet. In additional coverage about this tip, the witness also said that when the woman in the fur coat noticed her and her companion staring, she'd started cutting branches with the hatchet. About 45 minutes later, as the witness and her companion were leaving the park, she said they saw the same woman walking briskly past the park's bear cages, talking to herself. When they spotted her, she was no longer wearing her fur coat, and the two kids that had previously been with her were nowhere to be found. The witness said the woman was also missing a shoe.
17:22 Speaker 00 Now, I was a bit curious about what the heck this witness meant when she referred to bear cages in the park. So I looked it up, and it's exactly what it sounds like. Turns out, starting in 1888, Stanley Park had its own pound, which became a zoo, and the first animal to live there was a young black bear. However, over the years, the zoo developed a not-so-good reputation for its questionable living conditions and mistreatment of animals, so it closed in 1997. But apparently, some of the bears that were housed there were still around in the 1940s and 50s, and their cages were near where the witness claimed the mystery woman had been walking by herself. At the time this happened, the witness and her significant other hadn't thought much
18:03 Speaker 00 of the encounter, because it wasn't uncommon for people visiting Stanley Park to keep hatchets on them in case they wanted to chop firewood. Also, when this was all going on, the witness and her companion were reportedly having a pretty big fight and ended up breaking up. So I kind of see why their sighting of the woman in the fur coat didn't really stick out to them at that point in time. They had their own issues they were dealing with. When investigators asked the witness to lead them to the spot in the woods where she remembered seeing the woman in the fur coat take the children, she led authorities to a spot in the park that was within 50 feet of where the remains had been found. According to the Vancouver Sun, it was believed this tip might be the key to solving the case. The woman that the witness had described seeing seemed to check a lot of boxes for
18:48 Speaker 00 authorities' female perpetrator theory. But it wasn't like that theory was the only one they were seriously considering. Investigators explored other avenues of investigation, too. For example, I found one instance where detectives looked into the disappearance of a father and his sons from Teaneck, New Jersey, that they suspected could possibly be connected. Detective McKay told Vancouver News Herald reporter Jim Smith that at some point in 1953, his department had received a tip about a guy named George Pefl, who'd vanished while reportedly taking a trip to Canada with his two young sons in July 1949. George had gotten permission from his ex-wife to take his kids there, but the trio had never been seen again.
19:32 Speaker 00 George then became a fugitive, wanted for parental kidnapping. McKay told Smith that authorities became more aware about the 1949 case while reading a June 1951 issue of an American magazine called Coronet. And it seems that's when McKay decided to look into whether there could be a possible connection.
19:52 Speaker 00 According to Jim Smith's piece, after receiving a tip about a possible sighting of George in Vancouver, McKay showed up at a hotel room where the father was suspected of staying. However, the man McKay and his team found inside that room turned out not to be George. In the end, authorities ultimately ruled out George's boys as the Stanley Park victims, mostly because George's two boys were three and five years old when they vanished in 1949. And like I mentioned earlier in the episode, the estimated ages of the Stanley Park skeletons were believed to be slightly older than that. And by 1960, nearly three years into the investigation, the police had hit a wall. In that time, they'd looked into a total of 72 pairs of missing children, using information
20:36 Speaker 00 from immigration officials and transoceanic travel logs, as well as tips from divorce court judges. But nothing had panned out. Detective McKay himself had dedicated a lot of time and energy to the case, but unfortunately, he'd been required to move on to new cases during that time. By April 1960, McKay straight up told journalist Bob Porter that he didn't have much hope that they'd ever identified the two children or their killer. After that, 43 long years would pass before a cold case detective revisited the case. And his approach was simple: apply new science to old evidence. Like I mentioned earlier, when Albert Tong first found the children's remains, they
21:20 Speaker 00 were sent to Vancouver City Morgue for testing. For at least seven years after they were found, the bones were kept there. But by 1991, the morgue had moved locations and was actually operating out of a hospital. Somehow, when the transition occurred, the victims' bones stayed behind with the building, and that structure eventually became home to the Vancouver Police Museum and Archives. Coverage by Cold Case Files and The Province explained that by 1991, some of the bones and physical evidence were actually on display at the museum in an exhibit. The rest of the evidence had remained boxed up but unsealed in storage. In 1996, a sergeant with British Columbia's Unsolved Homicide Unit named Brian Honeyborne
22:03 Speaker 00 began investigating the case and officially reopened it in 1997. One of the first things he did was remove the skulls from the police museum and send them off for DNA testing. The expert he sent them to was a friend of his named Dr. David Sweet, who was a forensic dentistry expert at the University of British Columbia. Dr. Sweet suspected authorities' best shot at getting usable DNA was gonna come from the children's skulls. So he extracted some of the teeth that were still in place, froze them, and tested the pulp inside for DNA. While he waited for the results, Sergeant Honeyborne cremated some of the other bones and held a small service for the children on a police boat at Kitsellano Point near Stanley Park.
22:45 Speaker 00 He told reporter Gordon Clark that seeing the nameless young victims' remains on display at the museum had never sat right with him, and he believed that they needed some kind of memorial to honor them. About a year later, by March 20, 1998, Sergeant Honeyborne and Dr. Sweet got the DNA results back and discovered what I imagine felt like bombshell information. The babes in the woods were actually a pair of boys, not a girl and a boy. They were estimated to be between 6 and 10 years old, and they shared the same mother, but different fathers, so half-brothers. This discovery meant that during all those years, police had been trying to find a missing boy and girl.
23:27 Speaker 00 They'd been looking for the wrong type of missing children's cases. Also, that prior witness report about a woman in a fur coat who'd been walking past the bear cages without her supposed son and daughter was no longer super important. Sergeant Honeyborne told the province, quote, "Had we known at the time that they were both boys, it might have made a world of difference. The whole file must be reviewed, and any involving a male and a female can probably be eliminated," end quote. When Honeyborne and his team went back through the case file looking for reports or tips that had been submitted for pairs of missing boys, or two children in general, just not sex-specific, they found something interesting.
24:07 Speaker 00 In 1953, a high school biology teacher named Lawrence Smith had told police that he'd seen a woman with two small children walking along the Stanley Park seawall in 1947.
24:21 Speaker 00 At the time, Lawrence was visiting from several hours away, and he said that the only reason he'd really noticed the two kids was because he'd heard children's voices and a distinct ringing sound like something repeatedly striking a metal railing that was along the seawall path. He claimed that when he saw the pair of children and the woman who was with them, one of the kids was holding what appeared to be a hatchet and hitting it against the railing. Lawrence told authorities that later that same day, while at an overlook near Beaver Lake, he'd seen the same woman sitting on a bench, looking distraught. And next to her was a man who was pacing back and forth and seemed to be acting nervously. Lawrence said he immediately noticed that the woman had no coat on, was missing a shoe, and her bare foot and leg were spattered with a red substance that appeared to be blood.
25:06 Speaker 00 Concerned by the sight, Lawrence had asked her if she was all right, but the man who was pacing next to her interrupted and said that she'd just tripped while crossing a ditch and scratched her leg. Lawrence said he then offered to help the couple locate the woman's missing shoe, but the guy interjected once again and told him they didn't need any help because the shoe was torn and had already been thrown away. Unfortunately for Sergeant Honeyborne, Lawrence Smith had died by the time this prior tip was reviewed. So Honeyborne wasn't able to interview Lawrence or learn anything further than what he'd already provided in his statement. But ever the dogged investigator, Honeyborne put out a call for help in the province, asking anyone who was related to or friends with Lawrence over the years
25:49 Speaker 00 to reach out if they'd discussed these events with him prior to his death. After that, Sergeant Honeyborne sort of had to wind the case down. He just kept running into dead end after dead end. He was also chasing leads that were, by that point, almost half a century old. He'd reviewed many tips about people allegedly seeing a woman with two boys in the park at various times in the 1940s, but none of them led him to a name or any specific suspects. It seems that after discovering one of the victims' sexes had been labeled incorrectly by initial investigators, Sergeant Honeyborne wasn't sure what he could trust in the case file. He told the press that he wasn't even confident 1947 was the earliest the bodies could have been left in the park. One of the reasons he felt this way
26:34 Speaker 00 was because police back in 1953 didn't have help from a forensic botanist to learn more about the layers of leaves that were on top of the remains. Honeyborne said that had the bones been found in his era, that would have been a resource he felt was absolutely necessary. By the start of the 2000s, the case was basically back to square one, with the exception that authorities knew the victims were half-brothers. Without further information, though, it looked as if the case would go cold forever. But the universe had other plans. Nearly two decades later, it would be science and a long-lost relative's curiosity that would nearly have the final word on British Columbia's infamous Babes in the Woods case.
27:21 Speaker 00 One day last year, detectives knocked on the door of a multimillion-dollar mansion in Los Angeles County. Inside, they found a strange scene. A dining area converted into classrooms with children and toddlers seated at rows of desks. The couple that lived there had 21 kids.
27:41 Speaker 01 It's a house that looks like a castle, but it's under investigation for being a possible factory, a baby factory.
27:49 Speaker 00 Where had these children come from? Almost all of them were born through surrogates. But those surrogates had been deceived.
27:57 Speaker 02 Me and my coworker, we named her the surrogate pimp.
27:59 Speaker 03 That's the one time that we called the cops because she was screaming. And then he pulled out a gun.
28:04 Speaker 04 I started crying. I was like, what the heck did I just get myself into?
28:09 Speaker 00 I'm Ava Kaufman. "The Journey" is a new series from In the Dark and The New Yorker. Find it now in the In the Dark feed, wherever you get your podcasts.
28:26 Speaker 00 In early February 2022, a woman named Cindy Brady got a knock at her door where she lived in the suburbs of Vancouver. When she answered, she saw police detectives standing in front of her, and they had some shocking news. They told her that after years and years of investigating, they determined that her uncles, Derek and David Dalton, were the infamous Babes in the Woods victims who'd been found in Stanley Park in 1953. I can't even begin to imagine how this news shook Cindy. Because you see, several years prior to that moment, Cindy had started a quest to learn more about a murky chapter in her family's history. One that was filled with mystery and endless questions about a pair of boys that no one seemed to know much about.
29:10 Speaker 00 Back when Cindy was in her early twenties, she'd been flipping through a family photo album and seen a picture of two boys that she didn't immediately recognize. The first was Derek, who'd been born in 1940, and the other was David, born in 1941. Derek had straight-cropped light hair, while David donned a full head of curly dark locks that spilled over his forehead. From what Cindy was able to gather from reviewing family records and other photos, both of the boys had attended Henry Hudson Elementary School in Kitsilano and were raised by their mother Eileen, as well as Cindy's own mother Diane, who was the boy's half-sister. For as long as Cindy could remember, the story about what happened to Derek and David was that social services had taken them from Eileen after she'd become too impoverished to care for them.
29:56 Speaker 00 Cindy's mom Diane had told her that growing up in poverty in the city had been extremely difficult. And there were often times when she, Eileen, and the boys had experienced homelessness. Whenever Cindy had pressed her mother further on where Derek and David ended up, Diane would become emotional and shut down. Cindy told Vancouver journalist Eve Lazarus that whenever she'd try to broach the subject, all her mom would say about the boys was, quote, "That's in the past," or "We don't talk about that," end quote. Leading up to her eventual death in 2020, Diane suffered from dementia. But before she passed, Cindy got a saliva sample from her to submit to a direct-to-consumer genealogy company called MyHeritage.
30:39 Speaker 00 Cindy's adult daughter had done the same thing with her DNA too, because the women wanted to know if they had long-lost relatives, like Derek and David, still out there somewhere. But unbeknownst to Cindy and her daughter, Vancouver Police had also developed a strong interest in genealogy databases. Authorities were curious to know if they could use investigative genetic genealogy to identify unidentified remains in cold cases.
31:04 Speaker 00 According to a news release from the Vancouver Police Department, in 2021, about a year after Cindy sent her mother's sample to MyHeritage, a detective constable named Ida Rodriguez got in contact with a group of investigative genetic genealogists at a company called Redgrave Research Forensic Services, and she wanted them to conduct genealogical analysis from one of the Stanley Park skulls. With help from a DNA lab which specialized in handling really old degraded DNA, the Redgrave genealogists were able to retrieve a profile and they submitted it to a public genetic genealogy database known as JedMatch. JedMatch allows its users to give police and IGG practitioners permission to view their uploaded DNA data. And from there, the researchers built a family tree
31:49 Speaker 00 for the boy's DNA matches and looked for potential candidates that he could be related to. The end result was nothing short of amazing. Following the identification of maternal grandparents of the older of the two Stanley Park victims, genealogists discovered there was a living family member and after speaking with them, found out that they had uploaded their DNA to a direct-to-consumer database and eventually uploaded it to JedMatch. The comparison results between that relative and the Stanley Park sample confirmed that one of the previously unknown boys was Derek DeAlton. Further testing identified the other victim as David. Because they'd been born in 1940 and 1941,
32:30 Speaker 00 the duo would have been seven and six years old respectively in 1947, which was the year police originally estimated they'd been killed. On February 15, 2022, the Vancouver Police publicly announced the identifications and stated that they believed the boys were killed by a close relative who died sometime in the late 1990s. They also shared that the boys had a family member who lived near the entrance of Stanley Park around the time they may have been killed. When pressed by reporters on whether police maintained their original theory that the boys were killed by their mother, an inspector for the department remarked, "I think we have to make that assumption, yes. She would definitely be a person of interest if this case had occurred today." End quote.
33:15 Speaker 00 That same inspector later wrote in a news release, “After seven decades as a cold case, we presume that the person who killed Derek and David had likely passed away. But at this stage in the investigation, it was never about seeing someone charged for these crimes. It was always about giving these boys a name and finally telling their story.” End quote. Journalist Eve Lazarus spoke at length with Cindy Brady and her daughter for her podcast Cold Case Canada. And in that coverage, Cindy told Eve that she doesn’t believe her grandmother Eileen, who she described as a lovely and gentle woman, would have been capable of murdering her two sons. The podcast goes into a lot more detail than I can cover here, so give it a listen if you want all the finer points.
33:58 Speaker 00 But Eve reported that Eileen was born in 1917 in Edmonton, Alberta. However, when she was just eight years old, her mother died. After that, Eileen and her two sisters and two brothers were raised in a Catholic orphanage. After she turned 18, Eileen moved to Vancouver and worked various jobs to make ends meet. The first record of her in the city’s directory was in 1936, and then again in 1941. Alongside her name in that entry from 1941 is the word widow. But Eve Lazarus stated in her research that she could never find any formal record confirming that Eileen had ever gotten married or legally changed her surname to Dalton. According to producers for Killer Crime, there are records from the 1950s
34:42 Speaker 00 that confirm Eileen eventually changed her last name to Bosque. But why she did that remains unclear. She died in 1996 at the age of 78. We could speculate for days on whether Eileen is or isn’t responsible for her sons’ deaths, but I don’t think that’s appropriate. The program Killer Crime that I mentioned earlier and Eve Lazarus’s podcast go into deeper historical context about the time period in which Eileen’s boys were allegedly taken by social services. And it was really interesting to learn just how challenging post-World War II life was for some women whose partners had died and left them without financial support. For example, murders for the city in the year 1948 included at least three murder-suicides of kids by their mothers.
35:27 Speaker 00 However, we simply do not know if this applies to Derek and David’s case. Obviously, their deaths were horrible and senseless, but I think it would be unfair to make any conclusions about their mom without concrete evidence to support those conclusions.
35:43 Speaker 00 It appears that just getting the identifications was super important to the boy's relatives. Cindy Brady's daughter, Ally, told Eve Lazarus that getting some kind of answer to the huge question mark that had always lingered around David and Derek's fate was nice. She said, quote, "Even though it came to a devastating resolution, at least we know what happened," end quote. I wish we could learn more about who David and Derek were before their short lives were taken, but there just isn't much there, at least not much that is known definitively. As a mom myself to a spirited, curious, carefree little boy who was about the same age Derek and David would have been when they were killed, I can imagine them being a lot like him. In the photos that are available of them, they're doing handstands, going on outings,
36:27 Speaker 00 and making cute faces at the camera operator. They probably found all sorts of ways to be both loving and mischievous at the same time. Above all, they were innocent and deserved so much more than what happened to them. It may seem like a long shot, but if this case has proven anything wrong, it's that time, advances in science, and human curiosity can move an investigation forward that previously seemed destined to languish. If you know anything about the unsolved murders of David and Derek DeAlton, please contact the Vancouver Police Department at 604-717-3321.
37:08 Speaker 00 You can also leave a tip anonymously at the Vancouver Crime Stoppers tip line, 1-800-222-8477.
37:21 Speaker 00 Park Predators is an AudioChuck production. You can view a list of all the source material for this episode on our website, parkpredators.com. And you can also follow Park Predators on Instagram, @parkpredators.
37:39 Speaker 00 I think Chuck would approve.
37:46 Speaker 00 In the dark, even the most familiar trail can feel like it leads somewhere else. Every rustle becomes a warning, every shadow a doorway. In Full Body Chills, those doorways open into worlds pulled straight from your nightmares. This spooky season classic returns with chilling new tales, immersive sound, and no promise that you'll find your way back. So step off the familiar path if you dare. Listen to new episodes of Full Body Chills every week, wherever you get your podcasts.
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